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Three ways to 'level up' your WordPress website

By: Makeawebsitehub.com

Date: 2 August 2018

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One of the reasons why WordPress is very popular among website owners is flexibility. There is virtually no type of site you cannot create using WordPress as the core. There are game sites, fully-featured web services and apps, and news outlets with millions of visitors every day that use WordPress at the heart of their websites.

Flexibility isn't just an added value for WordPress. The entire platform is designed to be as flexible and adjustable as it can be. Using modular programming, a WordPress website can be made to meet specific requirements.

These tweaks will help you take your already-flexible WordPress site to the next level.

Check for speed

WordPress on its own is optimised for performance, but site performance isn't just determined by the platform you use. The plugins and themes you add to the site - including the ones you don't use - and the hosting service you use are also important things to look into when tweaking site performance.

You can use Pingdom or Google's own PageSpeed Insights to measure the overall speed of the site. You will get recommendations to help you optimise the page, eg by compressing images and removing redirects.

At the same time, look into the hosting service that you use. Don't forget to check for external scripts that may be slowing down the site. Complete these steps, and site performance should never be an issue.

Better user experience

User experience (UX) is another big part of a website's success. UX represents the kind of experience that visitors get when browsing your site, and the journey they take. You want your site to offer the best experience, to keep visitors coming back.

Again, WordPress offers so many ways to improve UX. Most WordPress themes are designed to be responsive. You can apply different compressions, or automatically optimise images on the fly with plugins like Automatic Lossless Image Compression. There is no need to deal with SSH commands or technical stuff.

Get plugged in

Of course, there is an endless array of visual tweaks for WordPress. The use of Google Fonts, social media embed, and video content will certainly make the site more appealing to its viewers. That said, you must never forget the small details that matter.

For instance, you can customise your 404 page (the error page visitors see when they follow a broken link) using a plugin - without the need for a single line of code. You can use the standard WordPress editor, the way you do when making posts or pages.

There are plugins to help minimise unnecessary animations and elements when the site is viewed on a mobile device. Others let you add ecommerce to your site, fight comment spam and many more useful functions - the list goes on and on.